Salesforce Marketing Cloud Oct 2021 Release: Your guide to all the important features – Part 2

This blog is a continuation of our earlier blog on the new and important features of Salesforce Marketing Cloud Oct 2021 release. 

For a quick recap, we have covered the following features in the first part of the blog:

• New Journey Builder activity for Interaction Studio
• Multi-factor authentication aka MFA 
• Improved interface to view the Journey Builder History & Analytics
• New Use Case support by Package Manager 

Now, let’s cover the rest of the important features from this release. Let’s begin…

Einstein Releases

1. Einstein Apps are Addressing Mail Privacy Protection Updates

As you might be aware that earlier this year, Apple made changes to the privacy policies enabling the users to have more say in their data usage via third parties. For marketers, these changes will affect the email open rate metrics and their calculations. 

In response to the changes announced by Apple, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Einstein apps also changed their method of calculating the metrics. Einstein’s apps now use the mix of open rate and click rate metrics as a form of engagement metrics instead of only using open rate metrics. This will help to provide a better perspective of customer engagement. 

The Einstein apps which are changing the engagement metrics approach are as follows: 

• Einstein Send Time Optimization
• Einstein Engagement Frequency
• Einstein Content Insights
• Einstein Engagement Scoring
• Einstein Content Selection

2. Identify Predicted Winners in Einstein Content Selection

Einstein Content Selection is an AI tool by Salesforce, which helps marketers to deliver the best possible content like images to render in emails dynamically. The content rendered in the emails is based upon the likelihood of having a better engagement with customers. 

With the new release, while performing Content testing, the system will showcase the winning Asset with a Predicted winner badge. This winning badge will be displayed post the testing is stopped and this will be displayed in the Asset detail page. 

Automatic Fallback page with Interactive Email Forms 

Interactive Email Form is a feature provided by Salesforce Marketing Cloud to engage with the customers on the email without moving them to a landing page. For example, a customer is expected to provide reviews for a product used by them. This can be easily configured within the email with the help of an Interactive Email block via easy & intuitive configurable options. 

For more details about the Interactive Email, visit the link below:
https://trailhead.salesforce.com/content/learn/modules/interactive-email-forms

With the Oct 2021 release, the Interactive Email Form allows the addition of the Call to Action [CTA] button in the form, which links to the CloudPages in Marketing Cloud. The Email Form on the CloudPages app allows them to create forms quickly with the help of drag & drop features.  

Previously, marketers had to create another form as a fallback mechanism on CloudPages, which was a time taking exercise.

Enhanced version of Lead capture app with Google Lead support  

The Lead capture app in Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a really useful app for marketers, as it helps them to capture the first-party data from Facebook. They can download the app from AppExchange, configure the lead capture setting, and start capturing the first-party data from Facebook. 

For more details on the Lead Capture app, visit the following link:
https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/content/learn/modules/advertising-studio-implementation/capture-leads-in-advertising-studio

With the recent release, there are two enhancements to this feature:

1. Enhancement to capture the Google Leads data

Marketers can now configure the Lead capture app to connect with Google and capture the leads from the Google platform directly into the Salesforce Marketing Cloud or Salesforce Sales cloud with additional profiles. 

Previously, the Lead capture app only supported the Facebook app 

2. Updated Lead capture app:

The Lead capture app is an updated app and it needs to be downloaded again if you have the legacy version. This will bring all the intended features onto Marketing Cloud or Sales Cloud.  

Wrap Up

We have covered all the important features of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Oct 2021 release and we hope it has given you a better understanding of the new features. To view the complete list of features of the release and the details, you can refer to the link below:
https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.mc_rn_october_2021_release.htm&type=5